Diversify City Schools and Make Them Better

In New York City, where public education is profoundly segregated by race and income, the anger and dismay over a plan to diversify a couple of elementary schools on the Upper West Side of Manhattan are not terribly unusual. Few issues get the city more riled — or put liberal values more to the test — than battles over housing and schools, complicated by old injustices and deep divisions of ethnicity and class.

Public School 199 is the “good” school — mostly white, with high test scores and lots of money. It is also severely overcrowded and has one of the longest waiting lists in the city. Public School 191, not far away, is the “bad” school, with low test scores, deep money woes, a reputation (undeserved) for being unsafe and a student body that is mostly black and Latino and mostly poor. It has a dynamic young principal, who has improved some test scores, but it still has lots of unused capacity.

Years of debate and stalemate have led this month to a moment of truth. The Department of Education had first proposed simply redrawing zones to send more children from P.S. 199 to P.S. 191. A predictable furor erupted, and last year the board backed down. Since then, the elected parent group from the local district, the Community Education Council, has united behind a more complicated plan to carve up the district and move children and schools around. P.S. 191 would get a new building a block away, and a fresh start. Part of a sprawling condo development, Lincoln Towers — middle class, mostly white — would be rezoned to P.S. 191 from P.S. 199. Another well-regarded school, P.S. 452, would move several blocks downtown, into P.S. 191’s old building.

The Department of Education is expected to deliver its response to this plan at the Community Education Council’s meeting on Wednesday night. What makes the council’s ideas worth pursuing — with caveats — is that they seem to offer a realistic chance to begin unraveling an inequitable status quo that has lasted for generations.

Many parents are, of course, unhappy about being zoned away from a top-notch school. Others will complain about the disruption to students in all three schools who will have to commute to different buildings. But this educational version of musical chairs may well be worth it if the plan integrates the schools and gives the students at P.S. 191 a better shot at an excellent education. The City Council member Helen Rosenthal, a defender of the new plan, is already thinking ahead to the tensions the changes could bring. “I hope that the amount of energy put toward opposing this plan will be put toward supporting 191 and all the schools once the plan is in place,” she said.